“We celebrate these holidays together, as they are very important to us - to the Romanian Polish community. The beginning of May is the combined festivities of the Polish Diaspora Day (May 2), the Polish National Flag Day (also May 2) and the Polish 3rd May Constitution Day. The entire Polish community in Romania's Bukovina gathered to fete this weekend" - Gerwazy Longher continued.
In Poiana Micului, one of the three most famous "Polish villages" of Bukovina, Poland's upcoming national holidays were already celebrated on Saturday - with the participation of local Poles, Polish diplomats from the consulate in Bucharest, local authorities and soldiers from the Polish Military Contingent stationed in Craiova. After the mass in the local church, the festivities continued through performances by Polish folk bands and a picnic at the Polish House.
As Longher said, "even when Poland was erased from the world maps during the partitions, in 1907 the Polish community in Bukovina finished the build of the Polish House in Suceava - which became the headquarters of the Union of Poles in Romania. From then on, it became customary for the members of the Association to have a Polish House in every Romanian town with a Polish diaspora. In recent years, we have managed to renovate or build seven Polish Houses and two headquarters in our area".
Bukovina region is the place of the largest concentration of the Polish minority in Romania. According to Longher, it is estimated that there are approximately 5,000 Poles in the region. They live in Suceava, Cacica and other cities and towns, but most "compactly" they are concentrated in three villages - Solonețu Nou, Poiana Micului and Pleșa.
The history of the Polish minority in today's Romania dates back to the Late Middle Ages - but most of the Poles arrived there in the late 1700s and early 1800s, looking for work. This way numerous Polish salt miners from Bochnia and Wieliczka appeared in the region with their families, finding employment in the salt mines of Cacica.
“When brine was discovered in Cacica in the 1700s - the authorities opened salt mines, and they needed good specialists. So, the salt miners from Poland's Kraków area came here to work. The second wave were the highlanders from the Polish-Slovak border region of Čadca, who came here in 1834 and founded the village of Solonețu Nou, and in the following years Pleșa and Poiana Micului" - Longher explained.
Another wave of Polish immigration arrived in Bukovina in the early 19th century, when the region was a crownland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - as was a significant portion of present-day southern Poland, occupied after partitions. Most of them were the peasant families forcibly relocated by the Empire's authorities after their involvement in the Jakub Szela insurrection.
Today, Romania's Polish community maintains close contacts with Poland, and the local authorities list it as a "model minority". During the communist era, Poles from Bukovina had virtually no possibility of contact with their motherland. “We knew Poland was there, far away” - Longher said, waving his hand to the north-west.
The Union of Poles in Romania chairman believes that the Polish minority's attachment to tradition, the determination of its members and - paradoxically - its relatively small number work to its advantage. “We operate within one organisation, we are not scattered among different structures. We are united and we do what needs to be done. We deal with culture and tradition, not any political issues. Everyone understands that we have to be together because there are not so many of us. If we are dispersed and divided, we will achieve nothing" - Longher concluded.
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Source: PAP